On 2 November 1930 Tafari Makonnen was crowned in Addis Ababa as Haile Selassie I, the Power of the Trinity, with a style that reached back into scripture and into the Kebra Nagast: King of Kings of Ethiopia, Elect of God, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. The claim of descent from Solomon and the queen of Sheba through their son Menelik was written into the Ethiopian constitutions of 1931 and 1955. Newsreel and press coverage carried the ceremony worldwide, and the sight of an independent African monarch crowned in that language, at a moment when nearly all of Africa was under European rule, was itself the message that travelled.
In Jamaica the coverage met a population already prepared to read it. Marcus Garvey's movement had made the redemption of Africa a public expectation, and preachers including Leonard Howell set the coronation beside two texts: the promise in the fifth chapter of Revelation that the Lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed, and the verse in the sixty-eighth psalm that Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. From that reading came the conviction that a divine king now reigned in Africa, and the movement named itself after the title he had held before the crown, Ras Tafari.
Rastafari is not one doctrine on this point and never has been. Some houses hold that he is God incarnate, others that he is the returned Christ, others that he is the earthly head of a movement whose divinity language is metaphorical. What is common is that the emperor's own repeated denials, including in a filmed interview in 1967 in which he said he was a man and mortal, are not treated by most adherents as settling the question.